Education’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’: Part One – Persistent Middle
Class Advantage1
New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, Volume 4, Issue 2, 77-88, 2007
MARTIN THRUPP
University of Waikato
INTRODUCTION
As a policy sociologist I have long been drawn to uncomfortable questions
about whose interests are really being served in and through education
(Thrupp, 1999a). I’ve been interested in how developments in education policy
and practice can lead to greater social inequalities and how seemingly
worthwhile policies and practices can be undone by other developments
(Thrupp, 1999b). In recent years I’ve also increasingly turned the spotlight back
on us as academics and researchers, to consider the politics of our own work
and ask awkward questions about whether we are part of the problem too
(Thrupp & Willmott, 2003). And, to some extent, I’ve begun to take up that
difficult challenge which is always being put to critical scholars, you know, ‘so
what’s the alternative?’ (Thrupp, 2005).
This two–part article is about how schooling, long geared to the concerns
and interests of the middle classes, remains so, and is even increasingly so in
some ways. I see this as an ‘inconvenient truth’ in several senses. First, while it
is now pretty clear that the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s benefited
the middle classes rather than the poor in education, and that pattern largely
continues despite the ‘third way’ rhetoric of this decade (Codd & Sullivan, 2005;
Tomlinson, 2005), there is at various points public, practitioner and policy denial
of the problem. This is partly because a lot of policy which advantages the
educational prospects of the middle class occurs outside education, for instance
in housing, and so people in the education sector tend not to look at it.
Meanwhile, within education, concern about growing class inequalities comes
up against competing and rather more celebratory discourses such as school
improvement, educational leadership and teacher quality which also distract
from the problem. In these ways increasing middle class advantage becomes
something not mentioned (an ‘elephant in the staffroom’ if you like).
Second, middle class advantage is not discussed much because of the
self-interest the phrase 'inconvenient truth' also implies. It is much easier to talk
in a disconnected way about an underclass, than to see ourselves creating the
educational problems of the poor. Middle class self-interest variously includes:
1
This article is based on my inaugural professorial lecture given at the
University of Waikato, March 2, 2007.
Martin Thrupp
78
• Seeing middle class children get advantaged which is in our
interests as middle class parents if we want them to ‘do well’;
• helping middle class children get into our schools and make good
progress which, for reasons discussed shortly, can be in our
interests as teachers and principals if we want to be seen as
successful practitioners; and,
• claiming to have solutions to working class disadvantage in
education which do not threaten middle class advantage.
Promoting these solutions can be in our interests as education
policymakers and researchers if we want status and career
rewards.
Third, ‘An inconvenient truth’ is also of course the title of Al Gore’s recent
film about climate change and an analogy we could draw there is that while
New Zealand education policy may be a little more benign than elsewhere at
present, there is a distinct likelihood that sooner or later, with a change of
government, or even a change of Minister, we could be engulfed by
international trends which will make things a whole lot worse.
But fourth, and again like climate change, we shouldn’t just sit on our
hands. There are things which can be done if we can summon up the political
will to do them.
Central to my argument are the concepts of social class and the middle
class. The development of post modernist and post structuralist theory over the
80s and 90s led to the wholesale neglect of class. Yet while post modernist and
post structuralist theory brought important insights, it distracted from the fact
that economic and social inequalities have been growing in many countries.
This is certainly the case for New Zealand over the 1980s and 90s, only the
United States had a larger increase in wage inequality (Glennerster, Hills,
Piachaud & Webb, 2004). Disparities in New Zealand living standards have also
continued to increase over this decade largely because sole parents, those
reliant on income-tested benefits, and large families have seen a reduction in
living standards (Jensen, Krishnan, Hodgson, Sathiyandra & Templeton, 2006).
The new concern with social class, as seen for instance in the work of
Mike Savage (Savage, 2000) and Fiona Devine (Devine, Savage, Crompton &
Scott, 2005) understands class in more subtle and more dynamic ways than in
the past, allowing for fractions within classes and for a wider range of class
practices and identities. Drawing especially on the theoretical tools provided by
the late Pierre Bourdieu, a number of academics have been carrying this
development into education (e.g., Ball, 2003; Reay, 2006; Vincent & Ball, 2006).
Diane Reay (2006) has recently pointed to the crucial relevance of class in
education:
Social class remains the one educational problem that comes back to
haunt English education again and again and again, the area of
educational inequality on which education policy has had virtually no
impact.
(p.304)
Education's 'Inconvenient Truth'
79
Another feature of the new emphasis on class in education has been
attention to the practices and strategies of the middle classes. Ball (2003: 5)
notes that what is of particular interest about the middle class is ‘how their
actions produce or contribute to the perpetuation, inscription and reinvention of
social inequalities both old and new’. Also of interest is how the middle class
‘fails to register the social implications of its routine actions’ (Savage, 2000:
159). Both of these are key themes in this article.
In New Zealand, as elsewhere, class intersects with ethnicity. Pakeha and
Asian families are much more likely to be middle class than M!ori or Pasifika
families, although both of the latter groups do have a middle class of course.
M!ori are also part of the class structure and yet class doesn’t get much
mention in M!ori discourses. The reasons for this are probably as much political
as intellectual in that M!oridom has needed to contest any perspective which
threatens to view M!ori as just another disadvantaged group rather than having
a special claim on distributive justice because of the Treaty of Waitangi (Sharp,
1990). Yet both ethnic and class cultures count and hopefully one day when
M!ori are having to fight their corner less we will see work which can genuinely
bring together theory and research across these two areas.
There are many ways to talk about persistent middle class advantage in
education, for instance:
• family resources, relationships between parents and schools and
middle class dominance of school governance (boards of trustees for
instance). ‘Home Advantage’ as Annette Lareau (1989) puts it;
• class biases in the curriculum and the need for what Bob Connell
(1994) has called ‘Curricula Justice’;
• middle class resistance to a shift from summative to more formative
approaches to assessment which has, for example, led to the take up of
a qualification from the United Kingdom, the Cambridge exam, in about
40 high decile schools;
• how within schools the perfomative policies which continue to gather
steam in education can favour the middle class in terms of them
accessing a more engaging and demanding curriculum. This is one of
those areas where we may have some problems in New Zealand but a
much more disturbing future is observable overseas, for instance the
commodifying effects of New Labour’s regime of testing and targetsetting in schools in England (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000); and,
• how the middle class access predominantly middle class school
settings and the likely advantages that those kinds of school contexts
bring.
It is the last of these which is the focus of Part One of this article. Here I
consider how even in the context of zoning the New Zealand middle classes
have been able to secure and in some ways improve their access to schools
with a predominantly high socio-economic mix. In the second part of the article,
to be published in the next issue, I explore the problem from another angle and
argue that the middle class have too many friends in education, which of course
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80
is another way of saying that not enough educators are really defending the
interests of the poor. None of this is truly inevitable however. My account is
grounded in what Gerald Grace has called ‘complex hope’ which is an optimism
of the will in relation to social inequality but one, which unlike naive hope,
recognises the very real historical and structural difficulties which need to be
overcome (Grace, 2004). Hence, the second part of the article concludes by
looking at how we might start to do things differently, how the orientation of
schooling to the middle classes might be reduced.
EDUCATION AS A POSITIONAL GOOD
Why are predominantly middle class, socially advantaged school settings – in
New Zealand those decile 8, 9, 10 schools – popular with most parents and
especially middle class parents? In part the preference for those sorts of
schools reflect the ideological assumption of a relationship between high social
status and quality but it also results from the importance of predominantly
middle class schooling as a means of social reproduction or mobility. By
keeping out children from poorer families, predominantly middle class schools
serve parents seeking relative advantage, that is, seeking a way to advantage
their child’s future prospects compared to others. Put another way,
predominantly middle class schooling is a positional good. Simon Marginson
defines positional goods in education as ‘places in education which provide
students with relative advantage in the competition for jobs, income, social
standing and prestige’ (Marginson, 1997: 38). The key point about positional
goods is that they are scarce in absolute terms so that only some people can
benefit from them. If they were available to all they would lose the relative
advantages they bring and hence their positional value. The fact that
predominantly middle class schools are seen to offer positional advantage helps
to explain why such schools are nearly always more popular than low socioeconomic schools which have little positional value almost irrespective of what
they do.
Although the class intuition of parents about the superiority of
predominantly middle class schools may be considered unfair to staff and
students in low socio-economic schools, it is not necessarily irrational.
Predominantly middle class schools really may be advantageous to attend
because they provide their pupils with better pathways to tertiary institutions,
better access to networks of power and information in the future labour market
(the ‘old school tie’), and extra resources. As well, there may also be
compositional or ‘school mix’ effects which push up student achievement in
predominantly middle class schools because of peer group, instructional and
organisational advantages that accrue to students who attend those schools
over those going to lower socio-economic schools (Thrupp, 1999a). The key
point to grasp is that these advantages of middle class schools are probably
school-based but not school-caused, they needn’t reflect better teaching and
management per se but probably stem directly from the other students in the
school through peer group processes or stem from the way school policies and
practices of many kinds are supported by high levels of student compliance,
motivation and ‘ability’ which are in turn class-related. It’s also important to say
that the existence and size of compositional effects remains a matter of some
debate (Thrupp, Lauder & Robinson, 2002).
Education's 'Inconvenient Truth'
81
PSEUDO-ZONING
What is quite clear, however, is that given half a chance the middle classes will
typically cluster together residentially, group their children together in
predominantly middle class schools and give them some sort of advantaged
education by excluding the poor. Historical analyses by Gary McCulloch (1990,
1991) shows this happening in New Zealand over many decades and a market
model intensifying it (see also Thrupp, 2007) . So what has the Labour
government in New Zealand done to prevent this? In 1999 Labour seemed to
have learnt the lessons of the previous decade about the costs of a market
model in education. Its pre-election statements expressed concern about
intensifying inequalities between what it called winner and loser schools:
Disparities between schools levels of resourcing are increasing as
the ‘market model’ is applied blindly. Because schools are expected
to raise more and more of the funds needed locally, schools in poorer
areas are penalised … Schools are being divided into winners and
losers according to their ability to fund the technology and other
resources needed to provide high quality education. High quality
education also requires high quality teachers. Unfortunately the more
schools become defined as winners or losers, the more difficulty
some schools have attracting and retaining quality staff.
(New Zealand Labour Party, 1999: 4)
The key policy response outlined by Labour prior to the 1999 election was
the reintroduction of zoning to prevent over-subscribed state schools picking off
middle class students from the catchments of poorer, less popular schools and
indeed this is what they did when elected by way of the Education Amendment
Act (2000). On the face of it this seemed to be Labour making a substantial
move away from the market back to its 1989 policies of over-subscribed schools
having home zones and balloting for out of zone enrolments; policies which had
been dropped by National in 1991 as it moved to increase market competition
between schools. Labour’s new policies seem to provide some protection to
lower socio-economic schools from having their high socio-economic students
creamed off by more popular schools and also to students from poorer families
to attend over-subscribed schools because all students living in-zone have the
right to attend their local school.
Yet school zones are not what they used to be. They are now effectively
drawn up by schools rather than Government and the Ministry of Education has
only limited control over them. The working definition used is simply that a
school has to be ‘reasonably convenient’ for its students; that is, a school that,
taking into account a range of factors, a reasonable person would judge to be
reasonably convenient. It has yet to be tested in law and can still allow schools
to target middle class students. Research into primary school zoning in
Christchurch has shown that in the absence of government control many
schools have been drawing up their zones in convoluted ways to ‘bypass more
deprived but closer areas in favour of further but wealthier suburbs’ (Pearce &
Gordon, forthcoming). Moreover, Pearce and Gordon point out that unlike the
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82
old Department of Education school zones, zones can now overlap, making
them ‘less the tidy product of the old system of regional planning … [and] far
more reminiscent of the free market where businesses compete for customers
and little or no co-operation exists’. So, New Zealand may have zoning again
but it has a new fluidity which allows middle class schools and families to seek
each other out and cut out areas of poorer housing. Such pseudo-zones do not
protect low socio-economic schools from having students creamed off by more
popular higher socio-economic schools. Nor do they prevent poor families being
cut out of a school’s zone.
SELECTION BY MORTGAGE
What can also be said with confidence is that living in-zone is now the only sure
way for children to be enrolled in a popular school, and any pockets of low cost
housing suitable for poorer families in the zones of popular schools will rarely
stay that way for long. In New Zealand, debate about the effect of being in the
zone of popular schools on the affordability of house prices (‘selection by
mortgage’) has tended to revolve around Auckland’s ‘Grammar Zone’ where
houses on different sides of the same street can have $100,000 between them
depending on whether they are in the zone or not (see Richardson, 2006).
Although there has been no New Zealand research on the relationship between
school zones and housing prices, it seems likely from United Kingdom research
(Cheshire, 2007) that only New Zealand’s most popular schools would
command such a significant premium. Nevertheless, in other parts of Auckland
and other New Zealand cities, it is not uncommon for being in the zone of a
popular high socio-economic school to make a difference to asking price and to
feature in advertising.
We need to see the interaction of education with what’s happening in other
sectors such as housing to understand the growth of social inequalities in
education. New Zealand has been going through a housing boom, some of it
due to immigration but a lot of it driven by middle class baby boomers investing
in their own homes and in rental properties as a means of saving for their
retirements with the neo-liberal shrinking of the state. Schooling plays an
important role in this investment activity because, for the same reasons houses
in the zones of popular schools are unaffordable, they are secure investments
and no doubt part of how many in the middle class maintain and improve their
financial resources. In the same study mentioned earlier, Pearce and Gordon
(forthcoming) note that the zones of Christchurch secondary schools serving
wealthier areas of the city have not changed for many years (the schools all
chose to retain geographic zones when they had oversubscribed status in the
1990s). For Pearce and Gordon this raises the unresearched question whether
these non-changing zones and the wealth of the communities have interacted
to compound inequalities between suburbs.
Also of relevance is how zoning in an era of sky-high house prices is
recasting the value of private schooling as a positional good. Private schooling
is increasingly being taken up by middle class parents who want a ‘top
education’ but are locked out of the zones of the most popular state schools
because of the cost of buying a house in zone (Grunwell, 2007). To use the
example Grunwell provides, it becomes financially more attractive to live in
Titirangi with annual mortgage repayments of $20,000 and school fees of
Education's 'Inconvenient Truth'
83
$14,000 than to live in Remuera with annual mortgage repayments of over
$40,000 (unless a family has more than one child of course). What this
suggests is that while private provision may be increasing, up from 3.5% of the
school population in 2000 to 4% in 2007, it is not necessarily the positional
good it was before the new zoning policies although this depends on the
specific private school concerned.
Another issue is the disadvantages for poorer families created by middle
class investment in rental properties. Investment activity from middle class
households has contributed to the poorest 30% of households becoming
dependent on the whim of their landlord as more and more people have to rent.
Making matters worse, in the 1990s over 13,000 state houses were sold off and
market rents introduced. This reduced the total stock of low-cost housing
available, leading to huge waiting lists even after income-related rents were
reintroduced in 1999. Overcrowded and insecure housing creates educational
disadvantages for the poor, especially transience between schools associated
with ‘househopping’ and absence from school due to health issues (Gilbert,
2005). This is one of those areas where the middle classes are securing their
advantaged futures at the fairly obvious but often unacknowledged expense of
the poor. It is also a good illustration of how inequalities being generated in
other sectors affect education in important ways but are off the radar for many
of us in the education sector.
Also, outside of education but impacting strongly on it, is the area of family
assistance and benefits. This relates to the problem of school resourcing which
is partly a vexed issue because all schools are struggling as Government
funding has been decreasing as a percentage of school income over recent
years, while ‘local fundraising’ (school fees/ ‘voluntary donations’, fundraising
and foreign fee-payers) has increased significantly.
Table 1: Government Funding as a Percentage of School Income
Primary
Secondary
1995
90.5%
85.8%
2005
88.9%
82.8%
1999
$301
$750
2005
$474
$987
Table 2: Local Fundraising Per Child
Primary (per child)
Secondary (per child)
(Quality Public Education Coalition, 2006)
School resourcing is also a vexed issue, however, because while the
government does provide equity funding of around $250m spread over 15
programmes and low decile schools get more of this funding than high decile
schools, it is not clear that the former get nearly enough to compensate for the
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84
poverty-related issues they face compared to the advantages brought by the
student intake in high decile schools, nor their inability to raise local money. For
instance, at Insoll Avenue school, a Decile 1 primary school in Hamilton, the
donation is only $10 a term but it is only collected from about 5% of parents.
And yet, low decile schools like Insoll Avenue don’t necessarily look underresourced, they often have well-maintained buildings and classrooms and
playground equipment. Because of this the New Zealand situation differs from
the United Kingdom and especially the United States where poor schools are
often under-resourced in more obvious ways. Yet huge amounts of extra
staffing and other resourcing would need to flow towards low socio-economic
schools to start to seriously offset the effects of poverty on children’s learning.
This would be electorally unacceptable; while all schools are needing to find
more money, and while the middle class are so easily able to avoid low socioeconomic schools, most middle class people have no contact with them at all.
It is also the case that policy doesn’t join up on these matters. The Ministry
of Social Development New Zealand Living Standards Report mentioned earlier
(Jensen et al., 2006) showed that the proportion of children experiencing
significant or severe hardship had increased from 18 to 26% between 2000 and
2004. The children experiencing the worst decline in living standards over this
time were mainly in families supported by benefits, with an overrepresentation
of M!ori and Pasifika families. The government’s stance on this is that the
Working with Families package and the promotion of a work ethic will fix the
problem. However, Susan St John of the Child Poverty Action Group has
argued that while the new spending on Working for Families will eventually
significantly reduce the incidence of child poverty in working families, those
children whose parents fail the qualifying criteria can be expected to slip further
below the relative poverty line (St John, 2006). If we were to take seriously in
education this increasing gap between the ‘in work’ and ‘not in work’ we would
be providing equity funding to schools according to the proportion of parents
who are in receipt of a benefit as this approach would be better linked to an
understanding of how poverty actually works than the current decile approach
based on census mesh blocks which is at best a very general approach to
recognising poverty.
CONCLUSION TO PART ONE
It is apparent that in the context of zoning the New Zealand middle classes have
been able to secure and in some ways improve their access to schools with a
predominantly high socio-economic mix. This may be considered unsurprising
given the positional nature of schooling highlighted here. It may also be
considered unsurprising when the available evidence from earlier times (the
post-war social-democratic period and the 1990s when quasi-market policies
were embraced in New Zealand) also shows New Zealand’s middle classes
seeking and being successful in finding ways to educate their children in
socially advantaged schools but doing this in different ways depending on the
policy of the day (Thrupp, 2007). Yet neither theory nor the historical record
makes such middle class advantage acceptable. It really is education’s
inconvenient truth and something needs to be done about it.
Education's 'Inconvenient Truth'
85
At a personal level such middle class advantage raises an ethical challenge for
all of us who are middle class parents: to recognise the line to be drawn
between advantaging our own children and doing this at the expense of other
people’s children (Kohn, 1998). For, as John Dewey said a century ago, ‘[W]hat
the best and wisest parent wants for his [sic] own child, that must the
community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and
unlovely: acted upon, it destroys our democracy’ (Dewey, 1902: 3). That
challenge not to harm other people’s children becomes a whole lot harder once
we acknowledge that school choice is not value-free: that enrolling our own
children in predominantly middle class schools has real implications for the
schooling and subsequent life chances experienced by the children who attend
the low socio-economic schools which this action creates.
Realistically, for many middle class parents the concern to advantage their
own children will be overwhelming. For this reason we should remember that
socially advantaged urban schools have long participated enthusiastically in the
project of creating middle class advantage and turn our attention to how those
who work in the education sector in key roles help to perpetuate middle class
advantage in education. Part Two of this article will therefore consider: how
teachers and principals collude with the middle classes as they seek out
advantaged settings for their children; how policymakers and politicians won’t
challenge the middle class for electoral reasons and so prefer to overemphasise school-based solutions, especially better teaching and leadership;
and, how they are supported in this stance by academics in areas like school
improvement and school leadership who act as textual apologists for the nonreforming reforms which prop up middle class advantage in education. Part Two
will also consider what can be done to begin to rein in middle class advantage
in education.
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The opinions expressed are those of the paper author(s) and not the New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work.
Copyright is held by individual authors but offprints in the published format only may be distributed freely by individuals
provided that the source is fully acknowledged. [ISSN-1176-6662]
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88
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Thrupp is Professor of Education at the
University of Waikato. Previously he taught at
King’s College London and the Institute of
Education, University of London. He has also
been a secondary school teacher. Martin’s
research interests include developing more
socially and politically contextualised approaches
to education management, the influence of social
class on school processes and the nature and
impact of recent school reforms in New Zealand
and England. He is the author of Schools Making
a Difference: Let's Be Realistic! (1999, Open
University Press), Education Management in Managerialist Times: Beyond the
Textual Apologists (2003, Open University Press, with Rob Willmott) and School
Improvement: An Unofficial Approach (2005, Continuum).